Adam Summers: Nothing fails like big government

Major government programs have proven not only to be failures, but to have been failures for a long time. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, our reliance on big government truly is insane. Below are but a few examples of such madness.

Education

The federal government played a relatively small role in education funding during much of the 20th century, but that changed starting around the mid-1960s with the passage of bills like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act in 1965. In the ensuing 50 or so years, the federal government has spent about $1.5 trillion on education, the bulk of which has gone to grades K-12.

Yet, despite this massive amount of funding (and even more at the state and local levels), educational performance has remained virtually unchanged. In the first reading assessment for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also referred to as the “Nations Report Card,” in 1971, 17-year-olds averaged a score of 285 on a 500-point scale. Scores haven’t budged more than a few points from that since then, and the most recent assessment in 2012 reflected a score of 287.

Similarly, math scores for 17-year-olds went from 304 in 1973 to 306 in 2012. Notably, students who attended private schools have consistently outscored those from public schools by an average of 10 to 20 points.

Government ‘Wars’

“War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne wrote in 1918. Aggressive war (as opposed to those engaged in reluctantly and for self-defense, which rarely has been the case) is the most violent act the state commits, not only against the enemy, but also against the individual. It can deprive him of his life and replaces humanity and cooperation with brute force. It has been used to advance the vainglory and deflect criticism of our political leaders, and has served as justification for numerous expansions of government power and violations of individual and economic liberties. It is altogether appropriate, then, that the government has referred to many of its programs as “wars” on something or other.

The “war on poverty,” initiated by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, coincided with the growth in education funding during the mid-1960s. And just as with education, the government has no real results to show for it. A 2012 Cato Institute paper pegged total welfare spending at nearly $15 trillion, making it more like $16 trillion or $17 trillion today. And welfare spending has accelerated rapidly in recent years. Since 2000 the United States has increased welfare spending by more than 38 percent, greater than every nation in the developed world except Ireland and Portugal.

In 1966, the first year after the “war on poverty” programs kicked in, the poverty rate stood at 14.7 percent. Today, it is 15.0 percent, and has fluctuated between a pretty narrow range of 11 percent to 15 percent throughout that period. Moreover, the poverty rate was already falling prior to the “war on poverty.” The rate fell steadily, from about 30 percent in 1950 to 17.3 percent in 1965.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, before government undermined and crowded out a good deal of private charity, there were a wealth of fraternal and mutual aid societies which provided poor and middle-class with a variety of social welfare services, including medical care, sickness and disability insurance, orphanages and old-age homes, support for widows and orphans, death benefits and business connections and job training. Sadly, these voluntary associations based on mutual benefit and personal ties have largely been replaced with paternalist government programs and dependence on faceless bureaucracies.

Furthermore, Americans are the most generous people in the world, topping the World Giving Index and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s list of voluntary private social expenditures (by a wide margin) for the developed world. Just think how much more charitable we would be if more than half our incomes were not taken by government at some level.

President Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” more than 40 years ago, in 1971. This, too, has proven to be a money pit and a colossal failure by pretty much any metric. In those 40-plus years, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion fighting drug use and abuse. As we have seen during both the Prohibition Era and the war on drugs, however, a plethora of laws and police raids are unable to stamp out a product when there is strong public demand for it.

If anything, demand for illicit drugs is higher than it was during the 1970s. Comparing National Survey on Drug Use and Health data from 1979 and 2012 reveals that the proportion of people who have tried illicit drugs has increased from 33 percent to 48 percent, including a rise from 30 percent to 46 percent of those who have tried marijuana and a jump from 9 percent to 15 percent of those who had tried cocaine.

Even former drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, who was confirmed as the new Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection earlier this year, admitted that the war on drugs has been a failure. “In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told the Associated Press in 2010. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

Moreover, by turning a voluntary activity involving the consumption of a substance by one’s own body into a crime, the government has created a black market, artificially raising the price and profitability of the drug trade and ensuring that it will be controlled by criminal elements (destabilizing entire nations such as Mexico and Colombia in the process) while crowding our legal system and our jails – at considerable additional cost.

And then there is actual war, the “war on terror.” The Costs of War Project estimates that the U.S. has racked up about $4.4 trillion in costs and future obligations (such as veterans care) to date for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001. This does not even include another $1 trillion or more for the future interest costs on borrowing for the wars. It also does not include the foregone economic gains that would have resulted if people and capital had not been diverted from the private sector to aid the war effort.

Moreover, this economic cost ignores the tremendous human cost of the wars. The Costs of War Project conservatively estimates that the wars directly resulted in over 350,000 deaths. The vast majority of these (220,000) were civilians, compared to about 88,000 enemy fighters, 32,000 allied troops and police, 6,800 members of the U.S. military and another 6,800 U.S. contractors. An additional 6.7 million people – roughly equal to the population of Massachusetts – have been displaced indefinitely and become war refugees.

The bulk of the human and economic costs were borne by the war in Iraq, a nation that had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks and posed no credible threat to our national security. The war on terrorism has only succeeded in creating a power vacuum that was filled by radicals, increasing terrorist activity in the region, aggravating ethnic tensions, fostering greater political instability, enriching war profiteers, erecting an enormous surveillance state that violates millions of Americans’ privacy rights on a daily basis and cowing airline travelers with pointless and humiliating physical searches.

A Better Way

The upshot of all this is: What have we gotten for all our blood and treasure?

It seems many people have been so inculcated with the idea that every social problem must be remedied with a government law or program that they have forgotten how to solve problems without the use of government force and taxation. A society of private and nonprofit institutions may not usher in a utopia, but a wide array of government programs have demonstrated over the years that they are, at best, no better than nongovernmental alternatives – and much more costly.

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